A model for Hillary Clinton 2016: Hillary Clinton 2000

The most urgent question Hillary Clinton would face if she were to run again for president is whether she could avoid the blunders — the bitter staff rivalries going public, the poisonous relationship with the press, the presumption of inevitability — that helped doom her campaign five years ago.

There’s one powerful piece of evidence that she could — her own bid for New York senator in 2000.

Text Size

-

+

reset

Dee Dee Myers: Hillary Clinton the 'North Star'

The Clinton of 2008 — portrayed as a brittle, hardened caricature and a relic of an era of political triangulation that the country wanted to move past — bore little resemblance to the 2000 version. The candidate who pivoted from first lady to Senate candidate overcame a “carpetbagger” tag, ditched the Rose Garden strategy and campaigned hard in New York’s purple upstate region.

It’s easy to forget just how precarious a venture Clinton was embarking on back then. The Clintons were fresh from the impeachment battle. The first lady was one the most polarizing figures in the country, surrounded by an international media swarm. The early betting was she couldn’t break through the protective bubble of Secret Service agents and advisers to forge a meaningful connection with voters.

Granted, one was a statewide race in a Democratic state, the other a national campaign. She had a bigger margin for error in 2000 — especially after Rudy Giuliani spent a year barely campaigning before pulling the plug — than against Barack Obama.

But if Clinton runs again in 2016, she’ll have to answer the overriding criticism of 2008: that she ran as if the nomination were hers. Chief among her challenges would be hiring a new team that includes staffers who aren’t familiar to her; the way modern campaigns are run will require fresh blood.

Here’s a look at what Clinton did right in 2000, and how the lessons of that effort could help her if she were to run again in three years.

Letting go and staffing up

The tales of dysfunction from Clinton’s 2008 campaign are well-known, thanks in part to the book “Game Change.” The team was composed of people who’d worked with her over the years, but was led, to much criticism after the fact, by pollster Mark Penn.

Clinton allies know she will need new faces for 2016 — people who are empowered and trusted to do their jobs. It was one of the most important leaps of faith she took in 1999.

Some of it was out of necessity: Clinton was campaigning in a state she didn’t know, where tribal politics were difficult to navigate.

When she arrived in New York, Clinton combined familiar advisers — admaker Mandy Grunwald, policy adviser Neera Tanden, advisers Mark Penn [whose role was dramatically expanded in 2008], Harold Ickes and Patti Solis Doyle, and aides Karen Finney and Kelly Craighead — with a large group of people she’d never met before.

They included Bill de Blasio, the current New York City mayoral front-runner, who was tapped to be her campaign manager; Howard Wolfson, the current deputy mayor under Michael Bloomberg who before 2000 had been chief of staff to Rep. Nita Lowey; press aide Karen Dunn, who last year was part of Obama’s presidential debate prep team; Jewish liaison Matthew Hiltzik; and, on the coordinated, soft-money campaign, operatives like David Axelrod, Sean Sweeney, later an Obama White House political hand; pollster Geoff Garin and former political strategist Gigi Georges.

As with other Clinton endeavors, factions emerged, and ultimately Solis Doyle took the reins of the campaign to drive it over the finish line. The campaign was messier than it appeared from the outside, but unlike 2008, it didn’t spill very openly into public view. But the clarity of purpose — getting Clinton elected — resembled what would happen during Obama’s 2008 campaign.

“From the outset, people united to be part of something historic, and you felt it,” said one former campaign adviser. “It wasn’t just that she was the only first lady to run; there had never been a woman elected statewide in New York before.”

Trusting that a new team can both perform its job well and with her best interests at heart would be critical for Clinton next time around.

Earn it, don’t presume it

The biggest complaint about Clinton in 2008 was that she ran a campaign of entitlement, showing feistiness and emotion only after Obama had surged, when it was already too late.

Ahead in the polls at the outset, Clinton adopted a Rose Garden strategy for much of the first part of 2007. It was a far cry from her 2000 race.

Beset by “carpetbagger” criticisms, the first lady, who hailed from Illinois, began her campaign with a “listening tour,” a concept roundly mocked in the news media at the time.